


The Little Things

by Zoe Rayne (MontanaHarper)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-20
Updated: 2005-06-20
Packaged: 2017-10-11 20:24:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/116722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MontanaHarper/pseuds/Zoe%20Rayne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the little things they all miss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Little Things

**Elizabeth**

Elizabeth's hands were clean. Too clean. She missed the feel of rich, loamy soil against her skin, the smell of growing plants, and yes, even the tiny crescent of black beneath her nails that she could never quite get rid of, not even with a nail brush and endless hand-washing.

That dirt was gone now, and she felt its loss more than she'd thought she would. In part it was because gardening had always been a way for her to connect, on some deeper level, to life; it grounded her in a way nothing else seemed to, and she missed that feeling desperately. Out here, in a new galaxy and facing a new, powerful enemy, she craved the soothing mindlessness of a garden.

She envied the Athosians the simplicity of their existence, their lives dedicated to planting and harvesting, to hunting and just _living_. She wished she had that luxury.

For all that Atlantis was a beautiful city, with its stained-glass windows and its elegant lines, it was still mechanical and sterile and utterly lacking in anything warm or green or alive.

She thought perhaps it would be enough to have some potted plants, or maybe a small raised vegetable bed on the balcony outside her quarters—she'd have to ask the botanists for something useful to grow—but right now she didn't have the time to care for a garden.

Right now she only had time to care for her people.

**Teyla**

The Earth people had stories, this was true. They were not the same as the stories Teyla had grown up with, nor were they told the way Athosian stories were told. Earth stories were images, projected onto a screen, each tale enacted for the eyes of voyeurs, or they were words, printed onto paper and bound together. Teyla found these ideas both fascinating and subtly _wrong_.

Stories should be shared, and they should be changed by the sharing rather than being passively swallowed like one of Halling's medicinal brews. Memories of her childhood were filled with the stories told by her father and the other elders, stories remembered and retold around the evening fire even now.

Something in her ached at the thought of the stories she was not hearing, and those she was not telling. She had made the correct choice, aligning herself with those living in Atlantis in order to save her own people, but still she longed for that which she had given up.

**Aiden**

Despite the different solar cycle in Atlantis, everyone did their best to make things feel as normal as possible. That meant three square meals a day, eight hours out of every twenty-four dedicated to sleeping, and church services once a week on a day they'd arbitrarily designated as "Sunday."

The expedition was too multi-cultural to support what Aiden thought of as a real service; they made do with a non-denominational chaplain for the Christians, and everyone else was pretty much left to their own devices.

At a real Sunday service, all the women would be wearing hats and the pews would look like rows in a garden, the red and purple and turquoise hats standing tall like flowers. There would be singing, too, and not the solemn, slightly off-key hymns the Atlantians sang, either, but joyous gospel music that opened your heart and made you feel like you were going to break apart from happiness. A real service wouldn't be so quiet; it would ring with hallelujahs and amens or, more often now as things with the Wraith got worse, it would echo with tears and sorrow.

No, it wasn't a real Sunday service, but it was all Aiden had and so he went.

**John**

Of all the things John had thought he might miss all the way out here in Pegasus, he was surprised to find that it was food he missed the most. Not that they didn't have food; the Athosians were doing a great job integrating agricultural knowledge and seeds from Earth with both the native Atlantican plants and their own traditional crops.

He just found himself craving food from home—pad thai and lasagna and even fast-food hamburgers—and he kept wishing that they'd find some new alien delicacy that exploded on his taste buds and made him forget how much he really wanted a tamale and some flan.

It was funny, though, that he was the one having the hardest time with the food issue. Somehow he thought that honor should have gone to McKay, who started to think about the chances of starving after he'd gone barely six hours without eating.

But while McKay complained a lot when there was a lack of food— and occasionally ranted about Russian cuisine—he really wasn't that picky about what he ate. So long as it didn't contain citrus, he seemed perfectly happy to eat anything that was offered to him. Hell, the man even _liked_ MREs, which was something John found deeply disturbing. MREs weren't meant to be liked, they were meant to be tolerated because you had no other choice—a _slightly_ better alternative than starving.

But then, this was Pegasus, and out here most of the alternatives were only slightly better than the worst-case scenario anyway.

**Rodney**

It was strange to wake up alone. Not that Rodney'd spent very much time back on Earth waking up with another person beside him, but he'd always had Cat.

He suspected it was the fact that he was mildly allergic to felines that was behind Cat spending quite so much time not only in his bed but curled up beside his pillow, happily shedding fur as close to his face as felinely possible without actually lying on top of him. Most of the time, Rodney had even let him stay there.

Because really, there's nothing quite as reassuring as a warm body curled up next to you, unless it's a warm body curled up next to you and making pleasant, contented sounds. He'd never admit it to anyone, of course, but the best part of the delusion when they thought they'd made it home to Earth was the idea that maybe he could talk Elizabeth into letting him bring Cat back to Atlantis when they returned.

No matter how irritating it was to wake up pinned under the covers by a sleeping feline stretched out between his legs, he still missed the feeling.


End file.
